Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Neural Coding And Decoding, Alexander Dimitrov

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

Methods based on Rate Distortion theory have been successfully used to cluster stimuli and neural responses in order to study neural codes at a level of detail supported by the amount of available data. They approximate the joint stimulus-response distribution by quantizing paired stimulus-response observations into smaller reproductions of the stimulus and response spaces. An optimal quantization is found by maximizing an information-theoretic cost function subject to both equality and inequality constraints, in hundreds to thousands of dimensions. This analytical approach has several advantages over other current approaches:

• it yields the most informative approximation of the encoding scheme given the …

Reducing Overdose Deaths Associated With Pharmaceutical Opioid Treatment Of Chronic Pain: Analyzing Interventions With A System Dynamics Model, Wayne Wakeland

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

A dramatic rise in the use pharmaceutical opioids to treat pain, and the associated opioid abuse and addiction, has created a substantial public health problem in the United States. Effective tools and interventions are needed to identify policies to reduce opioid abuse, addiction, and overdose deaths. A system dynamics model is used to identify policy interventions that will reduce the prevalence of adverse outcomes attributed to pharmaceutical opioids. Results suggest that it will be difficult to minimize negative outcomes without adversely affecting the degree to which chronic pain patients can access pharmaceutical treatment, and also indicate the importance of the …

Computational Pharmacology: Simulating Circuits Of The Brain For Drug Development, Patrick D. Roberts

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

The pharmaceutical industry is approaching unsustainable research costs to develop new drug therapies for mental disease because of the high failure rate in clinical trials. These failures are due to limitations of pre-clinical studies in animal models that fail to predict the efficacy of new drugs in human subjects. The gap between pre-clinical trials and clinical trials is particularly difficult in complex mental diseases such as schizophrenia because of the complex dynamics of the brain and the multiple chemical pathways that drugs can affect.

However, many biological mechanisms associated with schizophrenia are now understood, and computational power and methods have …

Aging-In-Place Research At Orcatech: Making Sense Of The Data, Tamara Hayes

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

The Oregon Center for Aging and Technology (ORCATECH) seeks to facilitate successful aging and reduce the cost of healthcare by establishing the evidence base for technologies supporting aging-in-place research and care. This is done through pilot studies evaluating the role of the technologies, as well as large longitudinal studies in which sensors are placed in the homes of community-dwelling elders to monitor daily patterns of activity, walking speeds, medication adherence, and other behaviors. These sensors collect continuous data that reflect normal variability in behaviors as well as trends that may indicate problematic changes in cognition or mobility. Because data are …